I'm struggling with this book and I'm discouraged.
This happens with every writing project.
I had a vision, an aesthetic, a feel, and it's not working out.
Discouragement turns to doubt.
Are the pictures I’m using any good? Will the book be helpful? Am I saying something that other people will comprehend? Am I qualified to do this?
Yesterday I made a comparison with what I'm doing to an Indie band writing songs or cutting an album. We would have written our songs full of passion. We loved those songs we made. We wouldn't hate them.
What I'm doing is comparable to that process.
except I hate what I'm making.
“With my writing, I feel like an indie band cutting albums - except we would have had unstoppable passion and I feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
And I think it's because I keep getting sidetracked in my mind about what it is I think people want me to write. Either what other writers would say I should be writing or what potential readers might think. What would professional photographers think?
But I'm not writing for the pro photographer, or the business photographer, or the photographer who knows it all.
I'm writing for the photographer who would find this interesting.
If it's interesting to me then it'll be interesting to people like me. There are other people like me.
What inspires this book for me
is that once upon a time I just wanted a camera and I thought that cameras would take good pictures. But my cameras never took good pictures and I didn't know what I was doing but I always loved photography.
Eventually, I did learn to take good pictures. After a job as a school portrait photographer for a few years, and photographing my own kids growing up, as well as other families,
I began thinking below the surface of photography.
And that's me;
I inevitably think deeply about the things I love
and overthink the things that I make.
As I get to the point that I'm doing the last major edit to this ebook - one that brings a higher level of organization and simplification - I begin to doubt it all and wrestle with myself.
Am I the only one who overthinks what I do? And yet I've seen what happens when I don't overthink what I do, when I rush something out.
The fact of the matter is I don't write well off the top of my head.
I need to dump a lot of ideas on the paper and then assemble them into something.
Along the way, about two-thirds of the way through, I begin to doubt what I’m doing and whether anybody will even find this helpful.
When I was a musician in a band, we would write songs together. They might start as a riff on a guitar or a drum beat. Somebody else would start playing too and we would look at each other and realize we just started creating a song. And within a couple hours we’d have something. And we would love it. Couldn’t get it out of our heads. We would polish it over the next couple weeks and play it at our next gig. We loved our new song. There was no self-consciousness about playing it and there was no hating it. I never put on one of our albums and hate what we made. I may hear our immaturity in an old album but I never hate it.
But I hate what I make
on my own.
I can love a paragraph that I wrote about moments and I can love pictures that I have and yet how do I find just the right picture to pair with that paragraph?
So the book becomes far more complicated than I thought and I begin to wonder would anybody even care about this?
I write on my own and it's me stuck in my own head,
but what if writing books was like writing a song or cutting an album as a band or musician.
I want to love what I make and love it no matter what others think of it - and trust that there is an eager audience waiting to hear a new tune.
I built up a worldwide audience through my article writing on Digital Photography School and have received many touching words of gratitude.
I need to create things.
T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶u̶d̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶h̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶.̶
These are the people to share with.
If I create things that I am truly excited about then I know other people who are similar to me will like them too. Even though as time goes by I can look back at some of these projects and e-books and see my immaturity - our works can grow with us.
I hear you. These are the same thoughts that go through my mind when I think about a project I’d like to work on. Thank you for pushing through the doubt and for sharing amazing work with us. I downloaded your e-books yesterday and thought I haven’t read them yet, as I quickly browsed through, I was legit thinking, “These are awesome! I can’t believe how professional these are!” I hope to push through my own doubts and create something that people like me will enjoy. Thank you for the inspiration!